Think of the conversations you've had over the years, usually with males I'm afraid to say, who hear one wrong buzzword out of your mouth. That's all it takes for their "mind" to snap closed, and off they go onto an angry rant, spewing out absolute opinions. The rants are mental recordings which the fellow gets off on. Digital thinking of this type poses as manly forcefulness, while in fact, it is emotionally self-indulgent and mentally lazy.
The best essays and blog posts are those that allow a wide range of readers to be in partial agreement. It would please me if people read my posts who think that 15% of my opinions are not complete crap, and therefore I might be redeemable. And yet, brutal honesty requires us to admit that there is something gratifying about going on a rant on the internet. Occasionally.
James Quinn outdid himself recently in an anti-consumerist rant about credit cards, big screen TVs, McMansions, SUVs, sprawl, etc. In a similar vein I wish I had a nickel for every time I've walked across the grocery store parking lot and had to dodge some noisy, diesel, brontosaurus-sized pickup truck. The driver is cutting a diagonal through the parking lot at 30 mph. He makes so much noise it sounds like he's flooring it. In his wake he leaves terrified and scattered ravens, and a carcass or two of stray cats.
Apparently that's the kind of vehicle people need to haul one human body to the grocery store, to work, or to drop off an obese child at school. Please don't say that he needs a ram-tough truck like that for the ranch, 20 miles from town. How many people make their living on the "ranch?" They spend their incomes from a job in town on their house in the exurbs, and the weed-whacker, riding lawn mower, horse trailer, four cars in the driveway, and a sun-bleached RV that sits in the back yard and gets used 6 days per year, probably on a NASCAR infield. There aren't many high-paying jobs in this area. I always wonder how the idiot affords that $40,000 monster.
Comments
It is amazing how powerful those pickup drivers think they are, when in fact, what they are doing requires no physical fitness or athletic effort, other than pushing down on the accelerator pedal with their foot.
I don't see any great or imminent cause of mankind's extinction. Those who do are possibly just giving in to the emotional rhythms of the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Apocalypse, Divine Retribution, Hellfire and Damnation, all disguised as "scientific" Environmentalism.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to put in your two cents.
I can't even answer my own question to tell you the truth. I think though that what I'm trying to get at is this:it's allowing ourselves to hear what others have learned through their experience and then bringing that to our own inner experience and seeing how it lines up. This is probably why I'm reading your posts in the first place.
You know, even the use of language itself ultimately lets us down.
I have particularly enjoyed your posts about your dogs, especially the one where you say you were never particularly one drawn to dogs until recently.